There are five good options for nuclear waste. They are: Dry Cask Storage (what we do currently), storage at Yucca Mountain (what the nuclear industry is paying for currently but not getting), reprocessing (makes the most sense to me ecologically), Deep Seabed disposal (the safest and most long term permanent option - which the French use for the subset of waste post reprocessing), or storing at the WIPP. The last option is a facility in New Mexico that is currently used to permanently store nuclear waste from the military. None of these qualify as an ecological disaster by any stretch.
Keep in mind that all of the nuclear waste the US has could be placed on a single football field. Part of why it’s not such a big problem is because there isn’t that much of it - not compared to coal ash or even the waste from old solar panels. That is due to the energy density of nuclear material which is millions of times more than the next most dense source which I believe is gasoline.
Nuclear material is like a natural battery containing stored gravity from a supernova.
Good analogy! Fleshing out thatt analogy - if you spill battery acid on somebody, they are disfigured for life. If they ingest battery acid, they are seriously injured or can die.
Now imagine a gigantic battery the size of a strip mall, filled with acid. In addition, you have to keep that battery safe from leakage or natural disaster for longer than humans have known how to cultivate crops.
Gosh, it’s almost as if this kind of “Both sides!” complaining (which is not true at all) is the best way of achieving nothing except maintaining a smug sense of moral superiority while the world goes to hell.
Why would they hate them? Warren and Sanders are both millionaires too - their equality and redistribution is Blue Speak for “the wall just got 10 feet higher”. It’s showmanship to trick simpletons in to voting.
It does seem to be a ‘right’ idiocracy thing. I’ll grant.
As to counter examples, there have been a lot of ledt-wing leaders elected who turned into repressive dictators - but usually that is after the event.
(The only other counter example I can think of is not really a public election example … but Corbyn being an avowedly anti-‘EU capitalist project’ leftie is at odds with many Labour voters. But sadly not at odds with enough of them. But Labour party members voting for a leader who was so anti-EU is just one of the myriad reasons we are in the shit now re Brexit, which is not working out so well for pro-EU Labour members, to say the least.)
Great job not answering any of the difficult questions and instead responding with solutions that do not yet exist, are terrible, or are currently not working.
The fact is people have already been negatively effected by nuclear power to the point where the elderly are volunteering for cleanup the toxic mess because they don’t have much longer to live anyway.
Back to the subject of safety. Would you mind explaining how nuclear has a good safety record or how it’s safer than wind as you have already claimed?
No, this isn’t “both sides” complaining, this is pointing out that the “two sides” you’re perceiving is a false dichotomy. This is not “republican vs. democrat” this is entrenched power versus effectively everyone else alive. They spin it into pointless squabbling, but at the end of the day the Democratic party supports the very same destructive neoliberal economic policies that are rocketing us toward a white-hot late stage capitalism ending.
Until one of those parties starts genuinely embracing socialist policies–and that means big scary things like going to billionaires and saying, “you can’t be billionaires anymore because it’s fucking insane that a person should be one in the first place” they are effectively identical to me. Democrats are ever so slightly better on social issues, but the vast majority of them are far to right-wing to be much more than “polite bigots who only feel the inclination to be polite because they still feel in control of the situation.”
The American political system is immensely corrupt. That’s beyond question at this point.
Get with reality, before reality dumps you in the gutter.
So…any Social Democrat should just arbitrarily overpay on their taxes to avoid a claim of hypocrisy? There is a categorical difference between arbitrary individual giving and supporting specific redistributive policies. Supporting policies means having specific solutions to reducing inequality that require funds from new taxes on the wealthy, or policies that shift profits from owners/management to workers/employees (or un-shift policies that allowed greater extraction of wealth from workers, to put it n socialist terms, which I would…). I think it’s pretty clear that the disagreement is clearly be between wealthy people who would support vs. fight policies that would change their person wealth. This isn’t about just making rich people arbitrarily poorer.
I hate that argument too. It’s like saying men can’t be in favor of women’s rights, white people can’t be in favor of POC’s rights, straight people can’t be in favor of LGBT rights. Plus it’s like they never heard of FDR.
You’re so close to getting it, seriously. Just ask yourself “if I really wanted people to lower my taxes, or just keep the status quo, but like most people outside fundie circles I / my friends found Republicans wrong and abhorrent, what would I do?”
I mean thems the facts just presented straight, and I don’t think it can be phrased any nicer without changing the reality or urgency it is conveying:
There is a false dichotomy between Republicans and Democrats as “regression” vs “progression”, when really it’s “fast regression” and “slow regression with stopgaps”.
Until the Democratic Party starts openly advocating the end of capitalism, they are just the politely pushing us the same direction that Republicans are, only slower.
This really is a case of the majorities ideas of reality being wrong, and if we can’t get around this, it is going to come back to make each of us suffer, painfully.
ETA:
Also re @LurksNoMore: when you insist that people who criticize Democrats from a Marxist angle are purists who will accomplish nothing, it really does seem like you, in fact, are pursuing the “best way of achieving nothing except maintaining a smug sense of moral superiority while the world goes to hell”.
The only way out of this is to accept that materially the Democrats are also our enemy, and while we should vote them in to slow down the fan-shit collision, we need to be organizing as leftists as much as possible in every city and state. That is what I am doing, and I am getting others involved. We’re growing, but we need help.
The analysis I read on another blog - and it’s spot on - is that modern capitalism follows this pattern:
some people get wealthy enough to buy votes by bribery - ooops, “campaign donations” and “speech honorariums”, among other things
those rich people get their legislators to pass laws giving them even more money, via monopolistic government purchases from their company(s), lowering regulations, and lowering taxes
steps 1 & 2 always occurred in history, and if things got bad enough, there would be major changes in the economy, but now …
… we have a new wrinkle: in the modern world of trans-national capital, if a nation revolts (either in a Big Way, or in small ways like raising taxes), a lot of them will move their billions to another country that has lower taxes or is easier to bribe. This lowers the capital their “home” country has to invest with, or build factories with, etc. Capital is stateless in the modern world. Some of this is happening right now
therefore … looking at the Big Picture, and the Long Term, … economically, the world is a bit terrifying. Oh, and add AI and robotics replacing millions of “useless eaters” (as republicans call them)
BTW, guess who predicted all this stuff in the middle of the 19th century? Here’s a clue: his initials are K.M.
